Шпоры по теоретической грамматике английского языка — страница 7

the relationship between the words being used and the force of their utterance is often oblique. For example, the sentence 'This is a pig sty' might be used nonliterally to state that a certain room is messy and filthy and, further, to demand indirectly that it be straightened out and cleaned up. Even when this sentence is used literally and directly, the content of its utterance is not fully determined by its linguistic meaning. A major task for the theory of speech acts is to account for how speakers can succeed in what they do despite the various ways in which linguistic meaning underdetermines use. In general, speech acts are acts of communication. To communicate is to express a certain attitude, and the type of speech act being performed corresponds to the type of attitude

being expressed. For example, a statement expresses a belief, a request expresses a desire, and an apology expresses a regret. As an act of communication, a speech act succeeds if the audience identifies, in accordance with the speaker's intention, the attitude being expressed. SPEECH-ACT THEORY AND RHETORIC        In his famous work, "How to do Things with Words," J. L. Austin outlined his theory of speech acts and the concept of performative language, in which to say something is to do something. To make the statement “I promise that p” (in which p is the propositional content of the utterance) is to perform the act of promising as opposed to making a statement that may be judged true or false. Performatives cannot be true or

false, only felicitous or infelicitous. Austin creates a clear distinction between performatives and constantives, statements that attempt to describe reality and can be judged true or false, but he eventually comes to the conclusion that most utterances, at their base, are performative in nature. For Austin, what the speaker is doing is creating social realities within certain social contexts. For example, using an explicit performative, to say “I now pronounce you man and wife” in the context of a wedding, in which one is marrying two people, is to create a social reality, in this case a married couple.                Austin described three characteristics, or acts, of statements that begin with the

building blocks of words and end with the effects those words have on an audience. Locutionary acts: “equivalent to uttering a certain sentence with a certain ‘meaning´ in the traditional sense.” Illocutionary acts: “such as informing, ordering, warning, undertaking. Perlocutionary acts: “what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading and even surprising or misleading”. Austin focused on illocutionary acts, maintaining that here we might find the “force” of a statement and demonstrate its performative nature. For example, to say “Don´t run with scissors” has the force of a warning when spoken in a certain context. This utterance may be stated in an explicitly performative way, e.g., “I warn you, don´t run

with scissors.” 54. Modality. Means of expressing modality. The category of modality is one of the most complicated linguistic categories which has various forms of its expression in the language. It has also a lot of various definitions & interpretations. In the Linguistic Encyclopedic Dictionary modality is defined as a functional-semantic category which expresses different types of relations between the utterance and reality as well as dif. types of subjective evaluation (оценка) of the information contained in the utterance. Modality expresses 2 types of relations and includes 2 levels. That’s why the linguists usually differentiate between 2 types of modality: objective (or primary) and subjective (or secondary).Ch. Bally considered that each utterance consists

of two parts, the part which presents information ( he called it 'dictum') and the part which presents the speaker's evaluation of this information (he called it 'modus'). The primary modality expresses the relation of the contents of the sentence to reality as established by the speaker who, choosing the appropriate form of the mood presents the event as real, unreal or desirable. It is expressed by the grammatical form of mood and thus it is a component of predicativity and as such it always finds a grammatical expression in the sentence. E.g. You are my wife. Be my wife. I wish you were my wife. Thus, primary modality as a component of predicativity is an obligatory feature of the sentence - we cannot make a sentence without expressing primary modality. Secondary modality